Solar for Digital Education on a Floating School in Loktak

Pilot / Innovation

Loktak Floating Elementary School, Langolsabi

The Loktak Floating Elementary School sits in the middle of Loktak Lake — the largest freshwater lake in the North Eastern region of India. The school was launched to provide basic education to the children of fishing households living on floating huts, who were left without any school after a massive eviction drive in 2011–12. Local teachers were engaged to teach there, and later began providing adult education as well.

Neither the school nor the households had access to electricity, and there was no realistic prospect of the grid ever reaching them.

The solar-powered digital education project was designed and implemented with the technical assistance of SELCO Foundation and the financial support of Tata Trusts, with the aim of giving teachers audio-visual teaching aids and content to work with — the kind of material that holds a child's attention, and that had simply never been possible in that location before.

An unusual off-grid problem

A school built on the lake's phumdi — the floating mats of vegetation Loktak is known for — is a genuinely unusual place to install a solar system. Everything had to be carried in by boat, mounted on a structure that moves, and left in a condition where local people could look after it without a technician on hand.

It remains one of our earliest and most distinctive pilot projects, and it is a fair summary of why Eartheners exists: the places where energy is hardest to deliver are usually the places where it makes the most difference. Read more about our Impact & Off-Grid Solutions.